Monday, March 23, 2015

Remediating developmental prosopagnosia

What do Oliver Sacks and Carl Kruszelnicki have in common? Developmental prosopagnosia - both of them admit to marked difficulty in recognizing faces.

I've recently had a look into the issue of remediation of prosopagnosia and while it appears that acquired prosopagnosia is difficult to treat, developmental prosopagnosia is much easier to remedy. There is interesting article in on-line Brain:

DeGutis, J., Cohan S., Ken Nakayama, Ken (2014). Holistic face training enhances face processing in developmental prosopagnosia. Brain.
Prosopagnosia has largely been regarded as an untreatable disorder.
However, recent case studies using cognitive training have shown that it
is possible to enhance face recognition abilities in individuals with
developmental prosopagnosia. Our goal was to determine if this approach
could be effective in a larger population of developmental
prosopagnosics. We trained 24 developmental prosopagnosics using a
3-week online face-training program targeting holistic face processing.
Twelve subjects with developmental prosopagnosia were assessed before
and after training, and the other 12 were assessed before and after a
waiting period, they then performed the training, and were then assessed
again. The assessments included measures of front-view face
discrimination, face discrimination with view-point changes, measures of
holistic face processing, and a 5-day diary to quantify potential
real-world improvements. Compared with the waiting period, developmental
prosopagnosics showed moderate but significant overall training-related
improvements on measures of front-view face discrimination. Those who
reached the more difficult levels of training (‘better’ trainees) showed
the strongest improvements in front-view face discrimination and showed
significantly increased holistic face processing to the point of being
similar to that of unimpaired control subjects. Despite challenges in
characterizing developmental prosopagnosics’ everyday face recognition
and potential biases in self-report, results also showed modest but
consistent self-reported diary improvements. In summary, we demonstrate
that by using cognitive training that targets holistic processing, it is
possible to enhance face perception across a group of developmental
prosopagnosics and further suggest that those who improved the most on
the training task received the greatest benefits.

1. FaceSay - which retrains face recognition, emotion recognition and following gaze - aimed at helping autistic kids (has some research proving that it improves behaviour in the playground)
2. A subtest of BrainHQ called Recognition that could be used for training for adults and potentially non-autistic children.